Will Reviving the Cod Industry Doom It Yet Again?

In an art gallery window on Harvey Road in St. John’s, a matted print is positioned at eye level. In the image, brightly painted wooden boats crowd a small, snug harbour, their cheerful colours reflecting wavily in the blue water. Inside the vessels are coils of rope, piles of net. To the left, striated cliffs jut toward the boats as though about to scoop them into a grass-topped embrace.

A small card, with text in calligraphic script, is propped against the window. It reads, in part, “Skiffs Before the Moratorium.” A second card explains that a skiff is a small wooden boat, twenty-five to thirty feet in length, that was once used in the inshore cod fishery. “[B]ut sadly today,” the card concludes, “many of the trap skiffs one sees are pulled ashore.”

It’s been thirty-two years since the federal government first closed the northern cod fishery. It was historically the colony’s main trade for centuries, but that changed, nearly overnight, in 1992, after a press conference at the downtown Radisson Hotel in St. John’s, when then federal fisheries and oceans minister John Crosbie announced a complete halt. Fishery workers would be compensated for ten weeks, at the rate of $225 a week, and then go on employment insurance. The meagre amounts were seen as an insult to the workers whose labour was responsible for a $700 million per year industry (almost $1.35 billion in 2024 terms)—and who recognized, in the mass layoff, the spectre of their culture on the brink of extinction.

Of course, fishery workers weren’t the only people who would suffer from the shuttering. With fishing boats now idle, fuel sales dropped. Schools amalgamated across communities as young families moved elsewhere and school districts struggled to fill classrooms. Those of us who lived through it will remember how local businesses offering small luxuries—restaurants and cafeterias, hair salons, cinemas—all felt the sting of a laid-off workforce.

The coves, harbours, bays, and inlets along the island’s coasts had never been densely populated, but over the course of the 1990s, many would empty out. Young people left in search of work, and older people moved to larger centres, such as Corner Brook or St. John’s, for better proximity to services. The moratorium was the catalyst for a crisis of Newfoundland and Labrador identity. Who are we, collectively, if we don’t fish?

Given all this—the loss of a way of life, the disappearance of actual communities, the skiffs-on-the-water nostalgia—you would expect that the federal government’s announcement, this past June, declaring the moratorium over would have been bigger news. Among my peers, the news felt strange. Abrupt. Anticlimactic. One friend sent me an email that read simply, “The cod moratorium is over?? I feel weird about this. I thought it would last forever.”

By some estimations, it probably should.

The Atlantic fishing industry, as we know it, began roughly 500 years ago. It was migratory, like the plentiful and valuable cod stocks it followed; fishers (mostly English and Irish) didn’t begin to settle on the island until the early 1600s. The work was dangerous, exhausting, and exploitative.

Men worked the boats—small skiffs and dories for the inshore fishery, larger schooners for the offshore—while women were responsible for “making” the fish: an arduous process of cleaning and cutting it, salting it, laying it on platforms called “flakes,” where it would dry in the sun (and covering the half-dried fish when rain threatened). Fishers were often paid in credit—a “truck” system which held them in indenture to the merchants who advanced the fishers supplies, clothes, food, and other amenities. The merchants set the prices high for the goods and low for fish, making it necessary for some fishers to bring in the biggest catches they could if they were ever going to pay their arrears. Many fishers lived and died in debt.

By the early twentieth century, fish stocks were already in trouble. When Newfoundland became part of Canada in 1949, control and regulation of the fishery were split between St. John’s and Ottawa. For many in the newly minted province, Ottawa may as well have been Mars, so removed was it from the day-to-day rhythm of coastal North Atlantic life.

Many, rightly or wrongly, place the blame for the decline of the cod squarely on Ottawa. Understanding why begins with understanding the distinction between inshore and offshore fisheries. The inshore fishery is seasonal, and fishers are viewed as independent businesses. Inshore vessels are small, locally owned, and operate in delineated coastal areas. The offshore fishery, however, operates year round. It includes both Canadian and foreign companies and is dominated by fleets known as “draggers”: capacious 100-foot-plus industrial vessels, equipped with onboard factory freezers. Under Canada’s watch, the offshore fishery grew in the 1950s and ’60s, with draggers scraping the seabed and scooping up masses of cod before the fish could make their way inshore.

This increased capacity, in concert with ecological changes and increasingly effective inshore fishing technologies, created an untenable situation. By the time the moratorium was announced, a generation of fish harvesters had been reporting smaller and smaller cod stocks—and smaller and smaller fish within those stocks. There was no question that something would have to be done.

What was done turned out to be more drastic than many in the industry had anticipated. The crisis was economic and demographic, but it was also cultural. Much of what fishery workers feared was the loss of a generations-old way of life. The whole world was changing in the early 1990s, and everything, from the anxieties of the recession to the culturally flattening effect of cable TV, was implicated in a generational shift away from the traditions of outport life. The fishery also hadn’t been the province’s sole industry for a while; while cod was king along the province’s eastern and southern perimeters, pulp and paper were the west coast’s claim to fame, and mining communities dotted the province, especially in Labrador.

Still, Ottawa had hope that the fishery could be saved. Crosbie’s initial announcement had estimated the ban would be for only two years. This, of course, was overly optimistic; it wasn’t until the late ’90s that stocks had increased enough for a very small fishery to reopen to inshore vessels. That fishery lasted only a few years, closing again in 2003 due to low stocks.

In 2006, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) reinstated cod fishing in the province, this time through a “stewardship” fishery as well as an Indigenous food, social, and ceremonial fishery in Labrador. This allowed inshore fishers to harvest a modest amount of cod, using more sustainable methods—lines and gillnets, as opposed to the trawl nets used by offshore draggers. The stewardship fishery is complemented by what is popularly known as the “food fishery,” a non-commercial inshore fishery that allows residents and non-residents alike to land a maximum of five fish per day, up to a maximum of fifteen fish per boat, in approved areas. While the food fishery itself is classified as non-commercial, the operation of tour boats that take people fishing is a steady business through the summer season.

Ironically, it is through the food fishery that many Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, whether newcomers or from generations-old families, have experienced a connection to the cod fishery for the first time. Which might explain, in part, why the lifting of the moratorium hasn’t garnered as much enthusiasm here as one might expect: we’ve adapted. In 1992, could anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador have imagined that the province would eventually be home to a $1.6 billion tech industry? Or that the province would have a film and television industry bringing in nearly $100 million a year? Or that 2022 snow crab exports would be worth $761 million? Or that fishing communities like Bonavista, Port Rexton, and Fogo Island would be reinvented as sites of fine dining, craft breweries, art festivals, and luxury accommodation?

Maybe most surprising: Would anyone have believed that finally lifting the moratorium would trigger consternation from the very industry that might stand to benefit?

The moratorium was never meant to be permanent; the goal was always to give the cod stocks time to rebound enough to support a sustainable commercial industry. The June announcement suggests that time has come.

The decision is based on a new statistical model, used by the DFO in 2023, that was updated to include historical numbers going back to 1954. The new model suggested that the historical cod population numbers had actually been lower than what the DFO had previously estimated. This, in turn, means that cod numbers are now closer to what they were seventy years ago: not because they have rebounded dramatically but because the level they have to reach in order to be considered in the “cautious” range—rather than “critical”—has been lowered.

While the DFO has been clear that the data behind the moratorium decision is peer reviewed and externally assessed, these assurances haven’t done much to persuade people on the ground. “DFO scientists” still hold bogeyman status for some in the province who feel that “trusting the science” is what led to the increased cod quotas in the 1980s as well as to the fishery’s collapse. (Indeed, the sentiment is not limited to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians; in a July press release, federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May reaffirmed her 1998 position that she would not trust the DFO with her aquarium.)

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians were quick to note that the timing of the decision gave it all a whiff of Liberal electioneering, a charge the Liberal MP for Avalon, Ken McDonald, was equally quick to deny. Other groups feel their input was overlooked: shortly after the federal announcement, Qalipu First Nation released a statement in which interim chief Jenny Brake revealed that the Indigenous groups of the province weren’t consulted. Brake argued that Indigenous organizations would have pushed for a different outcome if they had been at the table. Marine researchers also wondered whether the reversal of a 1992 federal decision takes into account the reality of twenty-first-century climate change. Others pointed out that the cod population hadn’t actually grown much over the past few years and asked what sense it made to raise the quotas without a rise in fish numbers.

Also vocal in its opposition is one of the province’s most prominent labour unions, Fish, Food, and Allied Workers (FFAW). Shortly after the federal announcement, professionally printed signs started appearing along the roadsides in St. John’s, in two designs: a blue background with a line-drawn image of a codfish and the text “SAVE OUR COD” in block letters, and a red version with the same image and the text “WE CANNOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST.”

Both signs point to a website: saveourcod.ca, which is run by FFAW. The website has statistics, facts, and a link to a House of Commons petition, which calls upon “the Government of Canada to immediately revert the 2J3KL Northern cod fishery to a stewardship fishery with the 2023 terms.” In plain speak: the union wants the reversal reversed.

To be clear, the total allowable catch set for 2024 is a fairly conservative 18,000 tonnes, the majority of which would still be allocated to inshore fishers; however, under the new regulations, a limited amount of commercial offshore dragger activity is expected to resume. This means the return of the draggers—which, for the past three decades, the moratorium kept at bay.

Three months into the 2024 fishing season, these misgivings proved valid. On August 26, the fishery in the waters off the east coast of Newfoundland was temporarily halted, as the quota for the first half of the season—originally slated to run until September 14—had nearly been met. Then, on September 10, a CBC report revealed that DFO staff had recommended in May that the moratorium stay in place, citing concerns about the cod stock’s “risk of decline.” The same report suggests that it was the province’s six Liberal MPs, not necessarily DFO scientists, who supported the increase in quota, seeing it as a route to political “victory.”

These are deeply unsettling developments for the inshore fishers who have been able to hang on to their livelihoods, reinventing the fishery model to suit the changing times. The stewardship fishery has allowed fishers not only to preserve a version of their way of life but also to marry traditional fishing methods with technologically advanced data collection in the service of creating a more sustainable industry. It has also given greater voice to Indigenous participants in the fishery—whose values and perspectives had long been ignored by decision makers.

Wherever you fall in terms of union sympathies, it’s hard to argue with the FFAW position that we mustn’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Poor fishery management in the last century led to the cod’s disastrous decline. If there is to be a future for the cod fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador, it will have to be built on policies informed by the people who will be most directly impacted, not just economically but in terms of culture, identity, and way of life. As much as we might cling fondly to the memory of pre-moratorium times, those days are gone.

Andreae Callanan is a poet and writer who lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.